On Fri, 21 Feb 2003, Tim Wright wrote: > On Fri, 21 Feb 2003, Yuri de Groot wrote: > > > It's going to take time, Jason, before we manage to educate everyone. If > > the upcoming, bright young IT professionals of tomorrow are exposed to > > opensource solutions, then there is hope. > > All of Canterbury's computer science graduates know how to use Linux (they > have to to pass COSC 204:) ...
It is certainly good that UC computer science graduates have to know how to use Linux. But this will hardly have a great impact on political decisions. The problem is the concrete in the heads of senior management and politics officials - they often have broad and completely antiquated life experience, but no up-to-date knowledge of the technical issues of the decisions they are expected to take. Nevertheless, they are often ruling against the judgment of the technology experts. This applies to politics as well as to large companies with deep hierarchy structures. I have seen a number of projects in economy, and also in politics, fail due to this. To come back on topic, yes, I have also worked in a networking project in which higher management refused to accept our technical arguments pro Linux. The outcome for the project was not nice, but we had warned them :-( The project required setting up a number of blank boxes as servers for several small LANs. The clear technical argument for Linux in this case was simply the efficiency argument for installing them all initially. With all the scripting possibilities around Linux, it would have been really easy to automate the process of installing a large number of functionally similar machines. But higher management said, it will be Windows NT... Starting with an individual license (I am not even talking about the license fees, but only about the technical issue of entering the license number during installation) for every new machine, etc.... If you want to change things, vote for candidates who take the matter more seriously than their ego in the next elections. Cheers, Helmut. +----------------+ | Helmut Walle | | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | | 03 - 388 39 54 | +----------------+
